The Menstruality Podcast - 228: The Menstrual Cycle and the Female Nervous System (Veronica Rottman)

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Historically, trauma research has been done primarily on men, and then applied to women’s bodies as if it’s going to work in the same way. But as our guest today, Somatic Emotional Processing facilitator Veronica Rottman, shares, women currently suffer from twice the rate of anxiety and depression, make up 80% of the population with autoimmune disease and are much more likely to experience burnout. Veronica is the founder of Soma School and has devoted over 40,000 hours over the past seventeen years to trauma resolution. In the conversation today she explores the female nervous systems; including how women and those socialised as female experience trauma differently inside a patriarchal culture, why the female nervous system is more prone to the freeze response and and why it’s important to think carefully about how we use the term ‘regulation’ when it comes to trauma resolution and our nervous systems. Veronica also has her own personal trauma healing journey from complex post-traumatic stress and in her earlier life, she experienced PMDD, menstrual pain and other symptoms, which she describes as her body revolting against the patriarchy. After practicing menstrual cycle awareness for many years, she now no longer has pelvic pain and today she shares how the practice has helped her to have a more embodied relationship to her pelvis, and to understand her cycle through sensations. We explore:The fact that Veronica hasn’t encountered a woman or person experiencing PMDD who doesn’t have a history of trauma whether it’s more subtle, low-level and chronic, or more extreme experiences. Why somatics and wellness need to be less focused on regulation for women, and more about being with and softening into what’s happening in our cyclical bodies. The role of oxytocin in the trauma response, why women experience trauma relationally, and the importance of cuddle puddles. ---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardyVeronica Rottman: @wakingwomb - https://www.instagram.com/wakingwomb

Welcome to the menstruality podcast where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexander and Sharnie, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, change makers and creatives to explore how you can, unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, I hope you're doing well today. Thank you so much for tuning in. So historically, trauma research has been done primarily on men and then applied to women's bodies as if it's going to work in the same way. But as our guest today,

the founder of Soma School, Veronica Rotman, shares, women currently suffer. from twice the rate of anxiety and depression, make up 80% of the population with autoimmune disease and are much more likely to experience burnout. Something needs to shift here. Veronica is a somatic emotional processing facilitator and has devoted over 40,000 hours to working in the field of trauma resolution. In the conversation today, she explores the female nervous system, including how women and those socialized as female, experience trauma, differently inside patriarchal culture. Why somatics and the wellness world need to be less focused on regulation for women

and more about softening into what's happening in our cyclical bodies, as well as the role of oxytocin in the trauma response and why we all need more cuddle puddles. Veronica has also had her own personal trauma healing journey from complex post-traumatic stress, as well as from PMDD and severe menstrual pain, which she describes as her body revolting against the patriarchy. I learned so much in this conversation and left not only feeling inspired,

but also a little safer in my body, which was a great relief in these times that we're living in. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Let's get started with the brilliant Veronica Rotman. Oh, Veronica, I just feel my whole nervous system relax as I sit down with you. I've been really, really excited for this conversation. And I'm so grateful for everything you do and for sitting down here with me today. So thank you.

Thank you so much, Sophie. I've been really excited to speak with you as well. And I think there's just, there's so much we can uncover in this conversation. Yeah. So, so much. So much. Where we always start with this podcast is we talk about where we're at in our cycles, whatever cycles we're tracking. Love it. And how it's influencing us today. So I'm on day, 13 and I don't think I've ovulated yet. I'm just full of life. I'm feeling robust. It's a very it's a good time in my cycle for me, especially as a working mom because I feel like I can do it. I can do this working mom thing at this phase of my cycle. I feel yeah, like I've got energy. My husband's ill, so I'm taking on more, but I can do that. In a week's time, not so much.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm feeling, I'm feeling good. How about you? Thank you for sharing that. I'm a little further into my ludial. So I'm day 17, which is, you know, that liminal space for me very much. And when I'm not totally aware of the day I am, if I haven't been like super glued to knowing the day, day seven, day 17 will speak to me. It's like, here we go. Here's here's the downshift, right? And so I typically will feel very aware of that in my body, in my womb space. And, and, I've come to really embrace my ludial phase, especially as I get older. And, you know, I used to have PMDD. So this, it's, it's really quite a shift. And I have to thank Red School and so many other people who, whose body of work has really change things in ways that I think people don't see coming.

They think they need the pill. They think they need, you know, some sort of. diet change and actually it was my relationship to my cycle and my womb that really changed things. So I'm grateful. Yeah. Amazing. I'd love to ask you more about that, but just before we do, because I know you had a journey with, I think you had a journey with menstrual pain as well.

Yeah. Probably undiagnosed endometriosis now that I'm looking back. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to ask you about that, but I just would love first to hear a bit about how you got into this work. I mean, maybe this is totally interconnected. How you got into this work. There was something I was reading on your Instagram. And it was such a beautiful quote. I'd actually love to read it back to you if that's okay. Yeah, thank you. As you said, you were looking at your mom's

copy of our bodies ourselves when you were a kid. And you said, what a gift that was to a person in this female body, this powerful, gritty, intricate, complex body and soul that through centuries of oppression remains the single most life-giving micro-expression of Earth herself. Wow. I said that. You did, honey. It's so good. Okay. All right. That's a lot there. Yeah. So I did grow up in a very body positive experience. My mom really celebrated her body. I didn't ever see her critique her body. She really insoled. still this sense of reverence for being a female and specifically the embodied initiations we move through in me. And so I grew up being like, can you tell me your birth story? You know, really

excited to get my first period. And, you know, this little tiny midwife. Like, I just had these things. I remember my mom telling me that she needed an episiotomy with me. And I was maybe like four or five when she told me that. And I vividly remember going like, well, that wasn't correct. So I really kind of had this innate love for our embodied experiences. And then I, you know, that was in combination with a lot of trauma that manifested primarily in my cycle. You know, there were psychoemotional symptoms and physical symptoms, including the menstrual

pain that no one could explain, you know, the PMDD that. that came later in college. And so I had both. I had the experience of I love this body. And I'm being met with symptoms that feel like my body revolting against patriarchy and the ways in which we're taught to live in resistance to our body. So then, you know, from there after college, I dove straight into semantics and became a birth dula.

eventually found SE, somatic experiencing, which is a form of trauma resolution. And while that had a huge impact on me, I knew that my body would need something more unique, more complex than just this very male-centered way of resolving trauma in the body. And, you know, luckily I had been immersed in red school and reading wild power. And I, I, I knew there was a way to bridge that gap and really weave in the layers that our body needs, the female body needs when it comes to somatics. And that's when I really felt my symptoms shift. Yeah. Amazing. Can you say a bit more about the symptom shifting process and where you are now with that? Yeah. So I don't have any more pelvic pain, which is,

quite incredible. I mean, I never had surgery. I was actually never formally diagnosed with endometriosis. I was told by a doctor who did inadequate testing on me that it wouldn't matter if I had endometriosis unless I struggled to have babies later on. And I was like, you know, a bit more of a people pleaser at the time. This was way back in college. I didn't have anyone advocating for me. So I just sort of took. that and then dealt with the pain for a long time. And I mean, it was like severe pain. Like, I can't get out of bed once a month. So to say to a woman, it won't matter. I mean, yeah, can we just pause on this moment of like, especially for anyone listening who's had this

experience, and I know for a fact that in our community, there are hundreds of people that have had a doctor tell them that their pain either didn't matter or doesn't, it didn't even exist. Right. You're making it up. The gaslighting. is so heavy when it comes to our pain, especially chronic pain. Even the word psychosomatic itself implies that a woman or anyone is making it up, right? That word has come to mean like, oh, you might be hysteric, right? And so there's this push towards changing the term to psychophysiological, because it's just like that word doesn't mean much anymore, right? So when it came to shifting, out of the pain, I needed to, yes, address the stories in my body, what I carried in my womb

intergenerational, like going back into my matriarchal lineage, needed to be, you know, felt into. And I needed my cycle. I needed not just cycle sinking while I have so much respect for that, you know, form of relating to your cycle. I find that it causes you to, want to perfect your cycle or biohack, which I think has the opposite effect. Instead, what I really needed, and I think what wild power helped me with was feeling my body, actually experiencing what my body had to say each day of my cycle through sensations, through sensorial information, right? That was the game changer. I also really believe that we need center our pelvis more in somatics. There's like, I see two worlds. There's like the world of if you

don't have your hands in your pelvis all the time, you're not doing it right, which I, you know, again, I love hands on hands and work. But then I also had the opposite experience in somatic trauma resolution that said like, don't go near the pelvis, right? It's dangerous. And I'm like, there's got to be a middle path here. We've got to be able to, you know, begin in little bits at a time, tracing our way back to an embodied relationship with our pelvis. That might not, that's going to look different for every woman, right? That might not mean, you know, using your own hands inside of your pelvis. That can be really triggering for a lot of people.

But it is worth it to come back into that relationship, grow neural pathway where neural pathway has been lost. So that was really big. I also love pelvic steaming. Oh, what's that? Like womb steaming, V steaming. Oh, steaming. Yes, yes. Lots of different names for it, but that is a consistent practice I come back to.

Yeah. Beautiful. And how about with the PMDDD? Yeah. Well, here's my take on this. And so I haven't met a single client that I've worked with and I've spent thousands of hours and one-on-one sessions and also leading classes, right? For women who are diagnosed with PMS or PMDD, which is PMS's evil twin sister,

I have not encountered a woman with that diagnosis, including myself, who doesn't have significant trauma. Yeah. You know, and trauma isn't everything. It doesn't have to be this big catastrophic event that we went through, although sometimes it is. sometimes it's ongoing, pervasive, subtle interactions that we had with caregivers or in certain relationships that cause our nervous system to have to adapt in these really reflexive, really protective

ways. And what people, I think, perhaps can benefit from hearing is that your emotional experience, even if it's a low-level chronic experience of harm in a relationship, your emotions are, as physical as your physical body. So I have really seen things shift in my own PMDD journey and with my clients through going back into those body stories. And again, being with them, digesting them in just the right amount, establishing safety in the nervous system in the unique, intricate, more complex way that the female body needs. Relating to our ludial phase in a different way, right?

I think we are sold this idea that our ludial phase is meant to turn us into moody bitches and it's just horrible. And what if we are meant to be bitchy? What if we're meant to, you know, kind of snarl more and set those boundaries? That was really big because I had a lot of fawning in my system. Yeah. Wow. It's so much that you're saying. It's so interesting.

Something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently around trauma and like the more subtle forms of trauma. is growing up as a woman in the 90s. Oh, yeah. Here in the UK. Like, just more and more that I reflect on that time and how much objectification was going on for women and this Ladet culture that we had here where I was just felt sexualized from the beginning,

you know, from as soon as I got into puberty and so sort of simultaneously sexualized and shamed. Uh-huh. So I think of just all those little moments in my family, just out and about in the world, where my body was either really sexual or just wrong. And how traumatic that is to have that day in and day out. Exactly. And this, I think, is what makes women's trauma so much more insidious and pervasive

than what we might orient to in like really traditional modalities. you know, there's this view of trauma as like this event that you complete a circuit through and then you're done. And for women, it's different. It's like a lot of us are coming out of these systems as we get older and going, like you just said, Sophie, it's so spot on. Like you can't see it until it's behind you in retrospect. You're like, oh, wow, I didn't even know that I was being, like you said sexualized and then shamed and my body represented something that I think honestly is like a threat to the patriarchy and that's why that's why we get oppressed right but it's the water we're born swimming in as little girls it's like how do you show a fish that it's in water so many little girls

were just born into that swimming in it internalizing it and their nervous system had to adapt to this, like, fact that, you know, systems will inhabit our body if we're not in our body. Oh, hang on. Systems will inhabit our body if we're not in our body. Thank you. Yes. Mm-hmm. I could cry. Yeah, and these are systems that are toxic to us. So I really appreciate you bringing that up because, yeah, growing up in the 90s, early 2000s, the culture was, it was just the norm. I watched movies, know, sometimes from that era, even like little kid movies with my kids. And I'm like, oh, wait, we, I forgot about this part. Let's have a talk about it, right? When like a woman is being sexualized in a kid's movie. I'm like, wait, how is how this is just what I watched. Yeah. And it

shaped us. We grew up inside it. Our neuro pathways are being formed. Our cells are being formed inside this culture. Yeah. Also when I look back at that time, I think I was a soccer player and I loved like in the rain, in the mud, slight tackling,

like I was ferocious, like kicking that ball really hard and just that wild, unleashed, untamed part of myself. And I didn't, I lost her somewhere along the way inside this culture and then I found her again through traumatic experiences

in like around Saturn return times. I just wish I could have kept hold of her all along. And I think like the work you do, the work at Red School of learning to inhabit our bodies through awareness, through cycle awareness, like helps us to keep in touch with that. Maybe more of that snarl that you were talking about earlier, that luteal snarl, that actually enables us to inhabit our experience more so that these systems can't get in so deep. Absolutely. I mean, as women in our female nervous system, we're already physiologically more prone to freeze and fawn, which are states that cause us to shrink ourselves. It's immobilization. It's appeasing others, right?

We see this a lot in little girls and women. And that archetype of the wild woman is so fiercely healing because it represents. the antidote to that. And I, again, underneath all the freeze I see in women, there is a snarl waiting to be let out. And it's what shows our body that we do have agency. So I think if we could orient to the ludial phase as this container through which we unleash that inner wild woman. And that it's not, you know, she isn't this entity outside of us. You know, she's in our body. She lives there and, you know, she has a voice and it's been really healing too to read the work of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, whose book was also something my mom kept out. And, you know, I was little so I wasn't reading it, but I just remember like staring at it and feeling the energy of it, right?

Even the title of it, women who run with the wolves. I remember going to a charity shop, I must have been 19. and I saw it on the shelf and I just bought it right there and then because yeah the I didn't read it I didn't read it for years I still haven't read the whole thing it's still it's it still just like affects you you know like if you're just around that book yeah it's like emanates that wildness oh thank you so much yeah what a gift and so when you say the female nervous system is more prone to freeze what do you mean yeah well and and here's that whole like is it nature or nurture debate with

which I'm like, it's probably both in different amounts at different times, right? But we, our bodies were the bodies through which the social engagement system formed. So when we're in a safe and social state, which is homeostasis in the nervous system, this is what creates that calm sense of alertedness. You want to connect with your own body and therefore other people. And it was female mammals who bonded with their babies that evolved that newer state, the newest state in our nervous system, safe and social state. So prior to that, we had more sympathetic states like fighter flight or the dorsal response,

which is the oldest state in our nervous system. Dorsal is freeze or immobilization, this combination of high sympathetic with the breaks on. And so because it was our female mammal sisters who evolved that branch, the safe and social branch, we are more impacted by that state, meaning we are more prone to tending and befriending versus conquest or authority over fighting, right? And that means that if culture is teaching us that we need to stay small, appease, stay quiet, that gets internalized, right? So I really see it as both this physiological

hardwiring towards wanting to care take more. That's, you know, built in. We need more oxytocin for the female nervous system. We run on oxytocin, the love neurotransmitter. And that also means if the culture is telling us your anger isn't appropriate and you need to put a smile on your face, that, you know, we're not going to go into healthy aggression, that wild woman, that sets boundaries, because our body has encoded that as that's not safe. You will be shamed. You will lose your space in the tribe. Right. So, yeah. Thank you. Such a great description. Can we talk about, for those that don't know about this, because it changes. my life when I heard about it about why the why we don't understand more about the female nervous

system on mass wow yeah I mean this goes back to centuries right where the old mainly white men studying our bodies deemed our bodies too complex something that you know is inherently what I want to say is it was these older white men who discovered our body parts, right? If you look at even names for certain body parts in the female body, the female pelvis, there's male names. They named like fallopian tubes, for example, came from a man with the last name, I believe was fallopio. He was Italian. So there's this movement towards like reclaiming these body parts by renaming them and calling them ovarian tubes because that's much more accurate, right? But our bodies have been in a way colonized, and then this really rippled into the way

we were underrepresented in research. So in the U.S., in the 1970s, it was decided that women should be excluded from research completely. This, of course, impacts women of color a lot more, right? and the idea was that our bodies were too complex. We have not just a circadian rhythm, but a whole infradian rhythm, where our bodies are shifting week by week. It's also more expensive to include our bodies in research, right? So it was also about money, and it was deemed too risky because we could get pregnant. Now, this was not overturned until the 90s, 1993, but even with overturning it, we're still only just seeing women being included in research. And, you know, so as recently as last year, right, we're finally seeing these discoveries about our body being uncovered.

However, a lot of us have already intuited a lot of these things, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff that they come out with that I'm like, yeah, duh. But we do need the research. We do. And I like to kind of meet at the intersection of science and what we might call, you know, sacred or spiritual. I really find that our bodies and especially the female body, I'm biased, is so deeply intertwined with life-death rebirth cycle, with, you know, what a lot of people want to categorize as like esoteric. When I see it as a manifestation that lives inside of physiological

events and experiences in the body, like I don't, I don't see them as separate. Yeah. Yeah, which if we think about the menstrual cycle, there's this epic heroine's journey unfolding inside our bellies every month for those of us who menstruate. And I say heroin, but to include everyone who menstruates, you know, those who don't identify as women, you know, this hero's heroine's heroic journey that's going on, where the potential for new life and a new beginning is released and open well prepared for and then a spark of life is kind of released and then digested and composted and released. It's a it isn't a psychospiritual death and rebirth that's available for us to kind of ride

the waves of if we can do this sort of longest, shortest walk from our heads down into our bodies, you know, from everything we've been told about who we are to actually what we're experiencing about who we are. Yes. So well said. And I think that, you know, we live in a culture. It's socialized into us that the heroine's journey, the descent into the body, any kind of physical, emotional, spiritual breaking down of who we are, of certain sensations

we need to feel is something we're taught about. bypass. It's like, nope, forward growth only, linear growth only, deny your body of this incredible gift, right? When you actually embrace it and move through it, I think it unlocks a capacity to meet ourselves at our edges, right? And stretch those edges little by little. So the female body really, I think, is an invitation for everybody to come into that. Like we all need a heroine's descent, actually. Not just those who cycle. And if we're only handed the map for the hero's journey, which I think is all we're given, really.

Maybe that's starting to change, I hope. But we're only handed the map for the hero's journey. and then I think a lot of people feel unfulfilled. They feel totally dysregulated in their nervous system. They feel like they're lacking that rich depths that we need to live a whole fulfilling life. Okay, I'm going to pause the conversation with Veronica just for a couple of minutes to share an invitation with you. Thousands of women and folks in the Red School community have experienced the healing impact of a daily menstrual cycle awareness. practice. And if you'd like support to start a practice or deepen your own practice, whether you're

working to heal health challenges or resolve trauma, or you're wanting to connect more to your power and your capacity to live your calling, a good place to start is Red School's free Love Your Cycle course, which is full of insight and guidance to connect you more to the power of the menstrual cycle. When you join, you'll also have access to the Red School Community Hub to connect with other cycle-savvy women and folks on this path, you can join the course and the community for free at redschool.net forward slash love. That's redschool.net forward slash love. And here's a story from Amelia about her experience with both menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause.

And a note for you if you'd like to explore more of Red School's menopause, free resources. You can go to Red School.net forward slash menopause. But here's Amelia's story. For years, I worked frontline with very traumatised individuals. This work culminated in secondary traumatic stress eventually leading to burnout. I wasn't aware of menstrual cycle awareness at this time, but feel certain that this grounding cyclical lens would have helped me no end. Since discovering menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause, I feel I found the missing

piece to add to the prevention and recovery conversation. Burnout prevention and recovery requires an attachment. nervous system and somatically aware relational approach together with menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. I'm finding that both for myself and my clients recovery, healing and prevention is so much more accessible. Thank you so much for sharing that, Amelia. Okay, let's get back to the conversation with Veronica. I had a conversation actually with Carly Mountain who wrote a book, Descent and Rising about the Anana myths, one of the oldest goddess myths we have of this, of this, of this, of this, of this, this descent, this heroine's journey.

And she featured cycle awareness in that book. So for anyone wanting to explore that, Carly Mountains conversation could be good. Yes. Oh, I want to check that out. I literally have dissent to the goddess sitting right here. Yes. Another great book, A Way of Initiation for Women by Sylvia Brinton Pereira. Yeah.

That's another book that I just picked up because of the picture on the front because it has, is it the Venus de Venus? Yeah. Yeah. Lvindorf, like that, you know. Uh-huh. We need to describe it to our listeners because I can't see what we're seeing, but those brilliant,

crevacious stone sculptures with huge hips and huge breasts of the goddess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So important. Okay. So I'd love to explore the difference in more detail between the female nervous system and the male nervous system.

And starting with regulation, this idea of being regulated. So in one of your Instagram posts, you said, regulation is just code for male. Standard somatic and nervous system health is based on male physiology, as we just spoke about, which is more predictable and regulated in its patterns. So the male nervous system has become the baseline, while the female nervous system was treated as a deviation in somatic and trauma resolution until now. Can you describe a bit about, well, firstly, regulation is code for male.

Yeah. Well, even that word regulation or regulation. regulate. You know, I have to use it because it's become, you know, the common phrase. But if I could, I would do away with it because there's so many ways that I think it hints towards this idea that we need to keep our emotions rigid and controlled and something that we have to really like force into being calm on the outside when actually there's a lot going on in the inside. Or when we're disregulated that there's something wrong with us and we've done something wrong. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah, there's a lot of shame tied up, I think, in being dysregulated.

When actually we're just having a perfectly healthy response to chronic stress to unprocessed trauma, right? And there's a lot of ways that our wounds, you know, have been controlled, regulated by governing bodies that are primarily made up of people who, don't have wounds, right? And so that word in itself, I think, is, it's very patriarchal. And if we look at trauma research, it's been done primarily on men and then applied to our bodies as if that's going to work. But what we see is women still suffering at twice the rate of anxiety and depression, we make up 80% of the population with autoimmune disease. I could go on and on. We are much more likely to experience burnout. And so in wellness cultures, even modalities that have really good intention. And I've learned from so many teachers in semantics who I really respect,

who literally say, you know, it doesn't matter if you have a cycle. Like this is just going to work for all bodies, right? And what I see working so much more effectively for, you know, thousands of women that I've worked with now is not regulating, but being with and softening into what's happening in our body. Knowing that it is going to fluctuate more consistently, unlike the male body, we have, you know, a third biological rhythm. You know, we don't just. have our nervous system rhythm, which is sympathetic, parasympathetic waves. We don't just have a circadian rhythm. We also have the infradian rhythm that needs to be woven into our approach to somatics, to wellness if we want to really optimize our healing, our transformation, and that's

not being considered. Yeah. And if we want to just feel more okay with that. We don't know, our changing states. Bless my husband, aid. I love him. And we've been together for nine years. And he still says to me, I'm just kind of waiting for the day when you might just be a bit more consistent. I love. You're probably going to wait until I'm about 55. And even who knows. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Bless their hearts. I know. And it's just so hard for him to understand because he doesn't have this infradian rhythm. He doesn't, he doesn't experience it. Can we speak about oxytocin? I remember, so it was probably 15 years ago,

I read this book, The Tending Instinct. In it, I learned that oxytocin is playing a key role that I didn't understand. And it helped me understand that that's why, especially when I'm with other women and we're in physical contact in some way. Just like a hug, like a cuddle puddle. I used to do this practice taught by Shamilly Gad at Awakening Women Institute

of Women's Temple where there's like gentle, loving, nurturing touch between women. And it was so, so nourishing. And I learned that oxytocin plays a bigger role in our stress response than we've been taught because all of the studies were done on men and on male subjects. Yeah, I'm so glad you're bringing this up. Because what we see is when women experience trauma, even things that would fall under the category of shock trauma, like a car accident.

Right. We've experienced the manifestation of trauma symptoms as relational, even when it's not relational. So, for example, if a client, you know, gets into a car crash, her system is orienting to who has been hurt. How have the people I'm with been affected? There's a lot more orientation to, the relational and the connection between tribe versus the event, like the, you know, the crash. And I feel this all the time. I'm like, you know, very attuned emotionally to the people around me. Sometimes they can be in another room and, you know, we know what's going on with them. And this therefore, you know, points to an intrinsic need for more of the oxytocin experience. So that love neurotransmitter, that compels us towards connection with ourselves, emotional, physical

connection with ourselves and others with nature. And remembering, right, going back to what we talked about earlier, we are more impacted by the social engagement system. And oxytocin is a pro-social neurotransmitter and hormone. And it is also parasympathetic downregulation. You know, the experience. is in your body where you can soften and relax and without regular amounts of parasympathetic downregulation. Our body cannot perceive that we're safe. So we think that feeling safe is like

this intellectual, I am calm like we can use these affirmations and change the way our body is neurocepting or perceiving on a subcortical level if we need to be in a survival response or if we can be in a safe and social state. And we are more in need of that experience, especially in certain phases of our cycle, where we naturally have more sympathetic dominance, right? In these phases, ideally we are nurturing ourselves and each other. We're calling in community care. This is something, you know, in wild power they talk about a lot, like late ludial, early menstrual. My husband knows, like, let her sleep in a little longer, right?

And in the world I live in, there's all this mom guilt about that. There's like this pushback, like, oh, no, I need to be the one that's doing it all, right? That's a whole other can of worms. And then the same in pari menopause, menopause, as things become more unpredictable, as we experience this longer inner fall experience, we do need more of that parasympathetic down regulation. And what are women told to do instead? It's like we fought really hard to be a part of the workplace.

And so now in our 40s, in our 50s in these times when we actually really need to be recalibrating our nervous system, we're being told. to push through and do more, right? And Dr. Kayla Osteroff is a pioneer in really bridging the gap, which I see more as like a chasm between women and men's bodies and really all bodies, right? However you identify, she's bridging the gap in the research being done on our bodies. and her work really points to the experience of oxytocin as being our primary regulator. And there's a lot of pushback on this. I'm just going to name that because it's really difficult to gather research on our body and share it.

There's so much controversy that gets stirred up. when we uncover things about women's bodies, it's really quite confusing to me. Yeah. I can imagine quite challenging to gather data that is actually solid data because I know my nervous system state changes whenever I enter into a hospital environment, for example. Yeah. Like even to be the experience of being tested in some way might change our nervous system state to the point where. Yeah, yeah. It's like we need to rethink the whole thing. If we're going to study, if we're going to study the shifts, how do we study the shifts in a way that actually enables us to, yeah, because so much is going on in our bodies just in the interplay with the world in a patriarchal society.

Yeah. So true. It's a really good point. You know, we see it in the in the birth world too. It's like it stirs up a lot of controversy because, yeah, of course we're going to have a physiological response to bright lights and, you know, a timeline. And a lot of women are giving birth in hospital still. So how do we, how do we work with that? Yeah. I had a very natural oxytocin response happening me throughout all the different procedures I had to have my son because I had lots of fertility. treatments and IVF and in the end of very medicalized birth. And I would always, I just always did

it spontaneously. Will you hold my hand to someone that was near me? Because I just needed, I think I was just questing for that oxytocin fuel safety, you know, like, you hold my hand. Yeah. And what a beautiful example of like reaching for support, which I think if we have internalized a lot of like, you know, hyper independence or, you know, be a strong woman, don't be scared, right? And it's like, it's actually we're all vulnerable, it turns out, and we need each other and we need that interdependence. And I think our bodies represent this invitation back into collaboration and nurturance over conquest. And we're seeing, you know, really wounded, masculine ways of living having really detrimental effects on the world right now. Oh boy are we seeing that playing out right now.

So something else that you shared in this Instagram post that really caught my attention was we are called to re-sensualize. I've returned to the body as a sight of pleasure, grief, anger, fear and every emotion has its wisdom to feel the textures of aliveness to trust sensation as truth. And it made me curious to hear if there were any stories that come to mind for you as what's become possible for women when you've seen. seen them move from distrust in their bodies to trusting sensation as truth. Wow, this is a big one. Yeah. So we do know that the female nervous system at our baseline, we have more interoceptive capacity, which means that we have more capacity access to our body's inner experience, sensations, emotions. And this just makes sense to me. You know, we have a monthly cycle where we feel our womb begin to sort of thrum or pulse with, you know,

the anticipation of bleeding. We have more of an impact through the social engagement system. And that means, you know, being with how our bodies are responding to relationship to our babies, right? And that is a beautiful gift. However, when you pair that higher interoceptive capacity with chronic stress, with living in resistance to our body, our cycle, when you pair that with unprocessed trauma, what we see happening, especially in women with like PMS, is that we have more ability to feel with accuracy what's happening in our body. And because of the stress, unprocessed trauma, living in resistance to our body, it causes us to interpret those sensations. as something to pathologize.

As everything I feel in my body is a sign of something I need to diagnose, something I need to control, something I need to fix, right? Instead of what our senses can give us, when we re-sensualize our experience, it brings us back into this relationship with our body where our body is a source of, safety, calm, pleasure, you know, and the journey of our cycle, which is inherently transformative. And this has to be done in just the right amount for each woman. So if we go straight into our body and try to feel these sensations where after, you know, years or even decades or a lifetime of seeing our body as a diagnostic tool versus a sacred temple, or, you know, something that is the best inner compass you could possibly use, it can backfire, right?

So we have to go slow. And this process of inhabiting our senses fully is such a powerful practice. You know, we think of sensuality as, you know, it's gotten tangled up with sexuality. So we're like, ooh, that's bad. Pleasure is dirty. or something I have to earn through hard work. When in reality, sensuality is, you know, looking and being in the experience of looking, listening, and being in the experience of listening, touching, right, and fully occupying that experience.

And without that, again, this comes back to our ability to register safety. if we're not occupying our senses in connection to what helps us downregulate, no matter how much reframing things mentally we do, no matter how much we reorganize our thoughts. If our nervous system doesn't get the chance to fully occupy our senses and experience safety, we actually can't rewire our nervous. nervous system and the patterns that we feel like we're looping in. Yeah. I'm curious if you can give an example of what this might look like in your day.

So if something, yeah, yeah, how might this play out in your day? Yeah. You know, it sounds, I just gave this like long-winded explanation of it and really. It's great. It's really quite simple. this means that in any moment, if we're living in relative safety, so I'm not talking about, like, I don't know, if you're getting chased by a bear, like, you don't want to do this, you want to be able to run, right? I don't know many people who are getting chased by bears. That's just the example that popped up. But if I am talking to you, right, and I am simultaneously feeling my body's contact with the chair. I'm sitting on. The support it brings me. My body, if you just notice, took a deeper breath when I said that, when I dropped into it. I can look at the way the sun is hitting the wall in front of me.

And just in that experience of taking in this really beautiful resource, which is sunlight, right? I actually feel lighter in my hands and my chest. That tells me my body is orienting to safety. My nervous system is experiencing that down regulation. And since I'm day 17, this is really impactful in my experience of my Luteal phase. Because what do we tend to do in Lodial? We have more progesterone. We're more detail oriented.

We're like, let's get it done. focus on like hard work let's you know fix things and that is helpful but when it's all we do of course our body is going to you know experience mood swings or adaptations to to that yeah i don't want to romanticize the past because i know that our modern day life is full of much comfort and goodness but i'm thinking about when we were more living on the earth in tribal communities as some people on earth are living today. But when more of us were, our day would look so different. It would be like, right, tend to the fire, prepare some food, look after a kid, build something, craft something. Whereas these days, like sometimes, especially in my luteal phase,

I'll be like, wow, I just stared at that screen for four hours and I just sat still. And like, no, wonder my body is like, afterwards, like, what's going on? Like, because it's not, we're not even evolutionarily evolved to be able to experience these things. Am I right? So right. And I love somatic practices. I do. And when people are like, what somatic practice should I do for anxiety? I'm like, find something to do with your hands off of the screen. You know, this is what our grandmothers were doing. They were sewing. They were baking. They were, you know, using their hands to nurture. They were holding children. They were, you know, yeah, like you said, tending to the fire. And so do the somatic practices. I'm not, you know, I'm not against them. I just, I, if you're using them so that you

can continue to bulldoze past your body's messages, I think they, they have the opposite effect, right? Right. When you were talking about our grandmothers then, I was, it just made me vividly think of an image that my mom has shared with me of her grandmother, so my great-grandmother. And she said she would basically always have a loaf of bread under her arm because she had kids and people all around her all the time that she was feeding. So she'd always have a loaf of bread. And she would just butter the loaf of bread and then cut the slice off and pass it on and then butter it again and cut the slice off.

You know, it's genius. A genius. What a genius move. I know so smart. My amazing great-grandmother, yeah, it was a different, a very different environment they're inhabiting and a very different environment that our nervous systems are trying to be with and adjust to. Yeah.

Yeah. You're making me think of resting at menstruation and one of the challenges that often comes up for women and folks in our community is, how do I slow down because I've been going so fast all cycle? And you're saying I should rest, and I know I should rest, but there's this momentum in me.

And when you talk about re-centralising, I'm thinking, well, how can we, use our senses to help us on this journey to slowing down. Yeah, yeah. And I do want to speak to, you know, what you just said is so important, Sophie, because so many people are running on nervous system patterns of protection instead of connection. And our nervous system will want to follow what's more familiar versus what's unfamiliar, even if what's familiar is stressing out, even if what's familiar is productivity for productivity's sake and shaming ourselves into hyper-productivity. So if we try to just rest because someone, you know, is telling us you do need to rest,

that can actually feel a lot like slamming on the brakes for our nervous system instead of gently, you know, pumping the brake a little bit. So instead, what I recommend people do is how can you take a micro moment through your senses to experience a little bit of that downregulation and safety in your menstrual phase? And then little by little hairline by hairline, how can we begin to stretch that out? So it might start off as like little micro moments of I see the sunlight, I feel the chair, I see Sophie, right? And then eventually the nervous system starts to go, oh, resting is safe, right? We're not being chased by a bear, it turns out.

Yes. Gladly. Something that you spoke about earlier was matriarchal lineage stuff playing out in your menstrual symptoms. And it's something I'm just fascinated with, and I know many in our community are, like how our ancestral trauma is alive in our bodies today. And I'm trying to think of a concise question because I know we're going to come into the edge of our time. But I guess I'm curious to hear a bit more of your experience about how you see that playing out in our nervous systems. Yeah.

Wow. Well, if we look at the journey of the ovum or women, we have a more direct experience of our matriarchal lineage, right? Because we were ovums inside of our mother as she gestated within our grandmother. And so in the matrilineal epigenetic inheritance, there is this stronger occurrence of being born into a body that is frozen, isn't a freeze response. So it might not be that our life experiences make sense to us in terms of the nervous system state we're in. But if we go back, what we see is this matrilineal epigenetic inheritance, running really strong. And for me, it was my own grandmother, who I never met.

She died of uterine cancer when my mom was young, whose body I was in. Wow. It really inspired a lot of my work because through doing a lot of somatic womb practices, I was able to connect with her. and it led to a lot of, you know, what I'm doing because, you know, it runs in our family. And eventually there's a person in our lineage who says, like, wait, there's something here that needs to be processed. There's something here that, you know, might not be mine, actually. but I have the resources to transmute that and become a bridge between the past, anyone in my past and

anyone in my future, my children, so that this doesn't continue on. And yeah, it's, I think, really important and something that gets overlooked a lot, especially when people are like, I don't have that much trauma. Like, why do I feel, why do I feel this way? Yeah. Yeah. And as we've explored, there's all the societal reasons why we might feel that way, and these ancestral reasons. And I'm also thinking of those who don't have children, that how breaking those patterns then changes how we inhabit the world and how we react and what we're bringing out into the world.

And that's how we collectively reweave this new story where we can or feel more safe. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, Veronica. If those listening want to connect with you and your work, what's the best way to do that? Yeah. So you can find me on Instagram at Waking Room. I have a website, waking-room.com. We're taking free soma calls for those who are interested in learning more and experiencing more.

Tell us about somer calls. Yeah. So you'll meet with a member of our team and they'll discuss the different options for moving through our programs. We have a 12-week and year-long program. We offer ICF accreditation for those who want to become somatic practitioners, trauma-trained, not just trauma-informed somatic practitioners for the female nervous system. So we'd love to hear from you. That sounds amazing. So what's the website? You can go to waking-wom.com. You can also go to my Instagram and go to link in bio and find it if you prefer that. If you like Instagram, I do recommend you go and check

out Veronica on Instagram because it's really like, not only your horreels and posts really informative, they're also often quite funny. And just they're always very like, yes for me. Like if you need some like cheerleading for your Lutiel snarl, like go and hang out with Veronica on Instagram. I love that. And thank you so much. It means a lot that, you know, you're engaged in my posts. and yeah thank you Sophie thank you so much for everything you've shared I feel like a little bit safer and I notice I'm taking a deep breath too

yeah I feel that yeah like a little safer in the world a little more like I understand myself and my past and I imagine those listening feel the same yeah you're awesome thank you so much thank you so much Sophie lots of love bye yeah bye oh thanks so much for tuning in today

I hope you enjoyed that conversation. And if you know someone that would really benefit from hearing Veronica's wisdom and this conversation, please do forward it to them. And that's it for this week. I'll be with you again in a couple of weeks' time. And until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.